Student, father protest Richwoods newspaper's censorship

A parent is threatening to sue District 150 about an editorial and cartoon that did not run in the Richwoods High School newspaper.

Pam Adams

A parent is threatening to sue District 150 about an editorial and cartoon that did not run in the Richwoods High School newspaper.

Daniela Vidal, the editor-in-chief of “The Shield,” the school’s newspaper, wrote an editorial — headlined “Sagging pants? How about a sagging relationship between the students and the administration?” — that detailed a rise in texting, fights and rowdy hallway behavior. She called on students to stop jeopardizing their education by making “foolish decisions” and called on administrators to “lay down the law and enforce it well.”

The editorial and accompanying cartoon were pulled from the December issue of the paper and have never been published.

After Heber Vidal, Daniela Vidal’s father, filed a grievance with the District 150 School Board earlier this month, school administrators relented enough to allow the editorial to run, though not the cartoon. Daniela Vidal and her father say that’s not enough.

Though students received the go-ahead from the district to run the editorial, they have not decided if or when they will do so.

Heber Vidal and his daughter are contemplating filing a lawsuit if District 150 doesn’t meet three demands: apologize publicly to the paper’s student editors, permit publication of both the editorial and cartoon, and require the school administrators involved in making the censorship decision to reimburse the district, with their own money, for the cost of printing and reprinting the December issue three separate times before it was distributed to students.

That would include Richwoods High School Principal Cindy Clark and District 150 Superintendent Grenita Lathan, according to Heber Vidal.

“All we wanted was for them to enforce the policies more,” said Daniela Vidal, referring to what she had described in the editorial as lax enforcement of the dress code, cellphone usage and discipline policies.

District 150 spokesman Chris Coplan said the principal, in consultation with the administration, made the initial decision to remove the editorial and cartoon because they were “disruptive to the educational process.”

According to policy, publications can’t include content that is inappropriate in a variety of ways, including libelous, obscene or “materially disruptive to the educational process.”

After Heber Vidal’s appeal “and further review by the principal and central office, in consultation with legal counsel,” Coplan said administrators decided the editorial met district standards, but the cartoon did not.

Daniela Vidal wrote the editorial, another staffer drew the cartoon. Another editorial, written by a different staffer, questioning President Barack Obama’s decision to withdraw troops from the Middle East also was pulled.

Daniela Vidal said the principal insinuated the cartoon was racist, said the editorial pitted students against administration and reflected poorly on Richwoods. The comments, she said, came during an hourlong meeting with other student editors, their adviser, Dan Kerns, who had approved the editorial, and three assistant principals. The cartoon depicts a boy standing in the hallway wearing baggy pants, a girl texting and a boy defacing a locker.

A subsequent letter from the editor in the February issue discussed the censored editorial. “For the first time in its history, an administrator stopped distribution of an already-printed paper,” Daniela Vidal wrote. Coplan said it was allowed to run because it followed the district’s policy.

Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, was encouraged by District 150’s decision to meet the students halfway. He said it is rare for a student to take legal action in a censorship case and “incredibly rare” to make a school board admit a principal made a mistake. It is also rare, he added, for a principal to censor a pro-discipline editorial.

“But it’s not at all unprecedented,” he said. “What schools will censor sometimes boggles the mind.”

The students are on solid legal ground, according to LoMonte. The U.S. Supreme Court has never said principals or school districts have total editorial control over student newspapers. Schools have to have a “legitimate educational justification,” he said.

Adam Goldstein, an attorney for the Virginia-based law center, said he hopes District 150 comes to view the cartoon as protected speech, also, “before a court orders them to.”

The Shield comes out once a month.

Clark did not see the December issue until after it had been printed. She stopped distribution of about 500 copies. Students hurriedly replaced the editorials on the opinion page with a crossword puzzle, and the district had the issue printed again. But that issue was also reprinted before it was circulated because of mistakes made by the printer, Coplan said.

The two additional printings cost between $400 and $500, Coplan said, and came from the marketing department’s budget rather than the student newspaper budget.

Though Richwoods’ student newspaper had never been formally reviewed before publication by principals in the past, now it is, Daniela Vidal said.

Her father is a Colombian immigrant and naturalized U.S. citizen who takes constitutional rights seriously. The entire episode sends the wrong message to students, he said. “That’s the main reason we don’t want to let it go with just publishing the article.”